Monica Lewinsky: The Online Rebuttal Is the New Black

Lately I have found myself in a summer blanket on my old red sofa “power watching” Orange Is the New Black. While no one I know well has ever been to prison, the show’s story lines are so riveting and the characters so emotionally nuanced that I am always drawn into the episodes, almost magnetically. And, like many other fans, I am transported into that cloistered world of raw emotions, human frailties, and power plays.

On occasion it crosses my mind that I too was once threatened with being locked up—by prosecutors involved in the investigation of 1998. (Oh, that pesky investigation.) At one point during intense negotiation, one of the lawyers defending me said, in confidence, “You better think carefully on this, Monica, or you’ll find yourself in an orange jumpsuit.”

“Orange,” I remarked, “is not my color.” (Don’t ever let it be said I am without gallows humor.)

Over a decade later (just the other day, in fact), I was Orange-bingeing, when along came Episode 11. (O.K., I’m a late adopter. Just getting through Season 1.) In it, there was a vulgar reference to my last name and DNA. I did what I usually do in these situations where the culture throws me a shard of my former self. After the cringing embarrassment, the whiff of shame, and the sense that I am no longer an agent running my own life, I shuddered, I got up off the sofa, and I turned it off.

But more and more I’m finding that those who have lost command of their public narratives, do the opposite. They shake off the assault or the slight, take control of their rightful place in their community or the larger culture, and use social media to return the salvo. They refuse to have their identities swindled or misshapen. Instead, they take charge. They turn the attack on its head and use it as an opportunity for self-definition, instead of just taking blood as they go down.

A recent radio story threw this practice into stark relief.

I was sitting in worsening and tormenting traffic in Los Angeles last week (fellow Angelenos will understand the lament, “Even Ohio Avenue is no longer a secret shortcut”). I was listening to NPR’s All Things Considered. One segment of the show addressed a trend: “The Rise of the Online Rebuttal.” On the air, correspondent David Folkenflik spoke of this new online phenomenon: “The instantaneousness of the digital age allows for rebuttals and allows for people who feel they have been wronged or misrepresented to forcefully answer in their own voice and not simply lodge an objection with the offending institution and hope that that journalistic outfit responds, and not simply [by] running a short letter to the editor or a quiet correction.” To cut out the middleman in instances like these removes the filter of other people’s agendas and interpretations. It diffuses the possibility of one’s actions being ignored or edited and taken out of context.

Folkenflik’s report reminded me of a story that had come across my browser in recent days. It concerned a young woman who was not even remotely a public figure until acquaintances began body shaming her. They graffiti’d some rocks on a local beach with ridiculous insults about her rear end. Very low-tech, indeed. But 14-year-old Carleigh O’Connell of Wall, New Jersey, took to the Internet to fight back. And she did it with style and verve. “I didn’t give them the power they wanted,” she would later note. “I wanted to show whoever wrote this that I was better than that.”

So what did Carleigh do? She posted a sweet and sassy photo of herself on social media—a photo taken from behind, peering over one shoulder, grinning. And she posed for this shot atop the scrawled graffiti insults. And she did it in a bathing suit. Carleigh responded to the bullying, in fact, by refusing to be bullied, by refusing to have her identity defined by others, and she used social media to regain what Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura calls a sense of agency. “To be an agent,” notes Bandura in a 2001 report on social cognitive theory, “is to intentionally make things happen by one’s actions. . . . The capacity to exercise control over the nature and quality of one’s life is the essence of humanness.”

Carleigh, however, didn't stop there. As of this month, she has been named an ambassador to ReachOut.com (to help spread the word about the perils of body shaming) and a featured guest blogger for AMightyGirl.com, a Web site that serves as a resource for “courageous girls.” Her mother, Daryl, tells VF.com that “Carleigh’s own stand against body shaming has obviously opened up many conversations across the world between friends, sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers, kids and their parents, and many professionals. The story ‘hit a nerve’ that has affected so many. We can only hope that these conversations continue and that the dialogue will create more awareness of the issue.” Daryl hopes that her daughter’s story and the ensuing dialogue will help bring real support to people who need it.

Haruki Murakami, the surrealist Japanese novelist, wrote about stolen identity in his short story “A Shinagawa Monkey.” In it, a sentient, talking, and conniving monkey lurks in the sewers of Tokyo—and steals people’s names in an elfin fashion. (In this instance, two characters’ name tags are stolen.) The names are meant to represent the individuals who live above ground, the humans who have risen above the simian.

In Murakami’s tale, one of the protagonists has no way to regain her past, present, and future. But, ironically, perhaps it is our access to the subterranean depths of the Internet—a shadowy medium that exists outside the physical world—that has allowed us, as Carleigh’s story proves, to begin to have the means of reclamation. “Hurtful experiences will happen all the time,” Daryl O'Connell says, “but how you react to them is what truly matters."

In Carleigh’s case, her body-positive photo went viral. An online rebuttal . . . in all meanings. Sounds good to me.